ASIST Welcome Reception
Sunday evening, I went to the opening reception for the ASIST Annual Meeting. A ballroom filled with small cocktail tables hosted the event. Many of the cocktail tables had signs for the various special interest groups (SIGs). The signs were abbreviations and acronyms, so they were somewhat foreign to me. I thought I might know what sigs I was in, but I couldn’t remember for certain and I didn’t see signs for two of them. With all the people in the room, it was difficult to see all of the signs. I joined Christina Pikas and Kris Liberman. Christina and I went to get food from the pasta buffet while Kris talked with some other people. On our way back to find Kris, Christina stopped at a table to ask what the abbreviation for the SIG meant. We hadn’t seen anything in our registration materials indicating what the abbreviations meant. It was Classification Research, so Christina and I moved on after exchanging looks. I noticed someone I knew at the SIG BIO table, so we stopped there. She and another woman were waiting for someone from SIG BIO so they could find out what it was. We talked to them for a while.
I excused myself to get something to drink. I poured myself some light colored liquid from a glass container. I sniffed it and tasted it because I didn’t know what it was. In the dim light, it looked like apple cider, but it seemed lighter in color. It tasted cool, sweet, and palatable, so I poured myself an entire cup. A man stopped me as I was walking away to ask what the drink was. I took another sip and told him I thought it might have been apple cider, but it doesn’t really taste like apple cider. It’s funny how when you don’t know what it is you’re tasting, it doesn’t taste anything like what it actually is.
I returned to the ladies at SIG BIO. A younger woman tugged at my sleeve to ask if I was part of SIG BIO. I explained we were standing there hoping someone from SIG BIO would appear so we could learn what it was. We were guessing biology or bioinformatics. She seemed genuinely disappointed we weren’t with the SIG. She tried to look up the SIG abbreviations in her registration materials, but didn’t see an explanation for them either.
Eventually, Kris came to get us so we could go to dinner with some colleauges of hers. We ate at a restaurant near there. Two information professionals work or had worked for NASA. Another told me where she worked and now I’ve forgotten. We talked about a variety of things related to our jobs. It was great to make these contacts.
